So, I'm trying to learn ZBrush for both professional and personal reasons, and I think that I'm just barely getting the hang of it. I've been at it for some time now, but I've recently gone on this tutorial kick- downloading them, watching them on various video sites, and scrolling through the forum at ZbrushCentral. Really, go and check out the gallery there. Some really awesome ZBrush work has been submitted there, including some by forum regular, makeup artist, Rick Baker. I'm nowhere near these guys, but I'm making the slow climb. Anyway, since my understanding of the program has expanded tenfold in the past week, I decided that I would finally attempt a full sculpt. Before, I had only attempted clumsy 3D doodles, but now I was ready to try a complete clumsy 3D sculpture. This is not a tutorial. I'm still plodding along, here.

       I was drawn to attempting to simulate an image produced by a scanning electron microscope for a few reasons:

• I've always been fascinated by such images.
• I hadn't seen anyone else attempt it yet.
• Because of the properties of such an image, I wouldn't have to fuss with elements of ZBrush rendering that I was still unfamiliar with: directional lighting, background, realistic color rendering.
• I knew that the point of such an image would be more the simulation of the electron microscope "look," so therefor the subject of my image could be sculpted with relative freedom- without having to adhere to an exact model in nature.

       Before going any further, I tested out my new electron microscope material on an existing model of a horn that I had recently constructed, using a tutorial on YouTube. You can find that tutorial HERE. I took my horn and added a 3D plane as a subtool and gave it some texture, for my background surface. Simple application of the new material produced the result you see here. I thought that it looked pretty darn good, so I immediately moved on to constructing the subject of my new image.

       Finding an electron microscope image of any old mite is pretty easy- so, I dug up this image of a dustmite in about 5 seconds. I wasn't sure of what kind of organism I wanted to sculpt, but this seemed pretty easy and a bit more interesting than a worm or something. Part of me wanted to sculpt something that would obviously be out of place in the microscopic world- you know, a character or something with a face or a logo on it. In the end, I decided to go with some sort of mite- nothing specific, just generally mite-ish. I just didn't want to have to deal with an accurate depiction, I wanted to have a bit of fun. When I get good enough at the program, when I am no longer battling with the technical aspects of the program, then I'll have more energy to direct towards being a better sculptor.

       Here's the model laid out in ZSpheres- you can see some of the surface topology peeking through the spheres. What I did- and I'm not sure I was supposed to- was lay out the basic framework in ZSpheres and then immediately constructed a new surface topology over those spheres(basically, I draw a grid- point by point- over the surface, covering up and holes or deformations formed by the sloppy arrangement of my ZSpheres, and this creates a new skin which I then use as my base polymesh). I think you're only supposed to do this when you want an underlying rigging for your sculpture. After arranging ZSpheres into a structure, they automatically generate their own polygons. Those probably would have done just fine, but for whatever reason, I was thinking that I would lay on a topology that had a much denser polygon count around the head area, so i could really detail it. I imagined putting tiny hairs and spines everywhere- which I never did. In the end, I kind of screwed myself up a bit. One, because creating the topology was really a pain in the arse, and Two, because I made the polygons too big in the abdomen region- which didn't give me much to work with when I started putting the fine details in. Anyone reading this who has a good knowledge of how ZBrush works is probably shaking their head or laughing at this point.

       The biggest problem I had was when I was creating the topology where the legs connected to the body. There's supposed to be a way to hide parts of the sculpture your aren't working on, making it easier to see what you're doing. This is supposed to occur when you hold down ctrl+shift and click and drag across parts of the model, except I couldn't get it to work. Every time I held down ctrl+shift and clicked, some menu would pop up. I have to figure out what I was doing wrong.

       If you aren't already drifting off, I won't bore you with with the fascinating details of the sculpting process, but I will show you what I was actually kind of pleased with. Below is top-down view of the mite. For most of the sculpting process, the mite looked like your average lumpy ZBrush doodle- which I seem to see a lot when looking at both my work and the early works of others. Symmetry makes it a lot more palatable, but a lumpy mess is still a lumpy mess. I don't have any images of this half stage, but all you need to do is imagine a mite-like thing with just a serious of random(yet symmetrical) lumps, gashes, and folds on its back> I was able to contour it our so it made a bit more organic sense. It still looks very lumpy to me, but I liked how the rake brush created these nice maze-like patterns. You can see in some areas that the grooves aren't as defined- that wasn't by choice. That's where I made the topology grid too broad, so ZBrush didn't have enough polygons to work with. The polygons are the clay you work with, stretch them out too thin, and then you're dealing with, say, 10 polygons covering an area, as opposed to the 200 covering a similarly-sized area somewhere else.